Free How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer Page B

encountered. But I knew that I was still a better player. The next year, however, was a different story. The computer was now a really formidable opponent. It had learned how to play from playing me."
    The software program became a backgammon expert by studying its prediction errors. After making a few million mistakes, TD-Gammon was able to join the shortlist of computers, like Deep Blue, that are able to compete with the best human opponents. However, all of these brilliant machines come with a strict limitation: they can each master only one game. TD-Gammon can't play chess, and Deep Blue can't play backgammon. No computer has been able to master poker.
    So how did Robertie get so good at such different games? At first glance, chess, backgammon, and poker seem to rely on very different cognitive skills. That's why most backgammon champions tend to play nothing but backgammon; most chess masters don't bother with card games; and most poker players couldn't tell a Latvian Gambit from a French Defense. And yet, Robertie manages to excel in all three domains. According to Robertie, his success has a simple explanation: "I know how to practice," he says. "I know how to make myself better."
    In the early 1970s, when Robertie was still just a chess prodigy—he made a living by winning speed chess tournaments—he stumbled upon backgammon. "Right away, I fell in love with the game," he says. "Plus, there was a lot more money in backgammon than speed chess." Robertie bought a book on backgammon strategy, memorized a few opening moves, and then started to play. And play. And play. "You've got to get obsessed," he says. "You've got to reach the point where you're having dreams about the game."
    After a few years of intense practice, Robertie had turned himself into one of the best backgammon players in the world. "I knew I was getting good when I could just glance at a board and know what I should do," Robertie says. "The game started to become very much a matter of aesthetics. My decisions increasingly depended on the look of things, so that I could contemplate a move and then see right away if it made my position look better or worse. You know how an art critic can look at a painting and just know if it's a good painting? I was the same way, only my painting was the backgammon board."
    But Robertie didn't become a world champion just by playing a lot of backgammon. "It's not the quantity of practice, it's the
quality,
" he says. According to Robertie, the most effective way to get better is to focus on your mistakes. In other words, you need to consciously consider the errors being internalized by your dopamine neurons. After Robertie plays a chess match, or a poker hand, or a backgammon game, he painstakingly reviews what happened. Every decision is critiqued and analyzed. Should he have sent out his queen sooner? Tried to bluff with a pair of sevens? What if he had consolidated his backgammon blots? Even when Robertie wins—and he almost always wins—he insists on searching for his errors, dissecting those decisions that could have been a little bit better. He knows that self-criticism is the secret to self-improvement; negative feedback is the best kind. "That's one of the things I learned from TD-Gammon," Robertie says. "Here was a computer that did nothing but measure what it got wrong. That's all it did. And it was as good as me."
    The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." From the perspective of the brain, Bohr was absolutely right. Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error. Mistakes aren't things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.
    Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford, has spent decades demonstrating that one of the crucial ingredients of successful education is the ability to learn from mistakes. The same strategy that Robertie uses to excel